A poetry vandal is on the loose in London. The Independent reports that artist Robert Montgomery has been plastering his “very pleasing verse,” which “[screams] out ideas about beauty, consumerism and hypocrisy” on billboards across the city.
Readers, let us know if any of these literary pick-up lines worked for you.
Rozalia Jovanovic has landed a new gig as the Observer’s culture reporter; Craig Morgan Teicher is the new poetry editor at the Literary Review; and JC Gabel has launched his long-awaited magazine, The Chicagoan.
Thanks to a $16 million budget cut, California libraries are now basically broke.
What caused a promising writer to plagiarize huge swaths of his debut novel? Lizzie Widdicombe investigates the strange case of Quentin Rowan, whose Assassin of Secrets was recalled five days after its release, when Little, Brown discovered that most of the novel had been lifted from other books. “Rowan’s method,” Widdicombe writes, “constructing his work almost entirely from other people’s sentences and paragraphs—makes his book a singular literary artifact, a ‘literary mashup,’ as one commenter put it...” Rowan has been living in self-imposed exile in Seattle since being exposed as a fraud, but not everybody agrees that the scandal should end his career. He “could have used a dream team of literary theorists to get him out of trouble,” Avital Ronnell remarked.
Over the past few months, Salon has been publishing less and getting way more traffic. Courtesy of the Nieman Jouralism Lab: “What Charlie Sheen taught Salon about being original.”
